The primary concern that scouts have about Michael Matuella is durability. So when the Duke righthander was scratched from making his second start of the season due to a forearm strain, it was a setback that led the Blue Devils training staff to keep him on strict pitch counts over his next few appearances. On Friday night against Pittsburgh, however, the reins were loosened and he showed evaluators the form that made him a candidate to be a top-five draft pick before the season began.

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What follows does not constitute the most rigorous of statistical analyses. Rather, it’s designed to serve as a nearly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, have considerably more enthusiasm for than actual knowledge of the collegiate game — a shorthand means, that is, towards detecting which players have produced the most excellent performances of the college season.

As in the first three editions of this same thing, what I’ve done is utilize principles recently introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.

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Cubs third-base prospect Kris Bryant produced one of the top minor-league seasons in recent history last year, recording a weighted batting line approximately 90% better than league average over 594 plate appearances between Double- and Triple-A while also playing a seemingly competent third base. Were minor-league WAR a thing, Bryant would have recorded the best one of those in all of affiliated baseball — roughly the equivalent of nine wins.

Largely as a result of that wildly successful 2014 season, Bryant enters 2015 featuring the top WAR projection among all rookie-eligible players — and one of the top WAR projections realistically possible for a player who’s made zero major-league appearances. His performance over the first couple weeks of spring training indicates — to the degree that spring-training performance can indicate such things — that he’s, at the very least, unlikely to be overwhelmed by major-league pitching.

Before Kris Bryant led all the minors in home runs, he led all the NCAA in home runs, too. In 2013, as a junior at the University of San Diego, Bryant hit 31 homers. That June, he was selected second overall in the draft by the Cubs. The next month, he was presented with the Golden Spikes Award.

Technically, the Golden Spikes Award is presented each year to the best amateur player in the country. In practice, however, the award has been given to a college player (either the four-year or junior-college variety) every year since its inception in 1978. Bob Horner was the Golden Spikes recipient that year following his junior campaign at Arizona State — a performance which convinced Atlanta not only to select him first overall in the draft that year, but also to send him directly to the majors, where he produced a 2.3 WAR in 359 plate appearances.

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What follows does not constitute the most rigorous of statistical analyses. Rather, it’s designed to serve as a nearly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, have considerably more enthusiasm for than actual knowledge of the collegiate game — a shorthand means, that is, towards detecting which players have produced the most excellent performances of the college season.

As in the first two editions of this same thing, what I’ve done is utilize principles recently introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, I published the third in a three-part series devoted to producing and analyzing objective demographic data regarding those players who’ve become good major leaguers. The thought has been that, at best, the results might have some predictive value regarding future good major leaguers; at worst, that they’d at least document the origins of the league’s best players.

In the third part of the series — an examination of which college conferences had produced the most good players over the last five years — I noticed that the Pac-12 Conference was responsible for an inordinate number of talented second baseman. Jason Kipnis, Dustin Pedroia, and Chase Utley were all drafted and signed out of Pac-12 schools — and Ian Kinsler had been compelled to leave Arizona State for Missouri only because he was displaced at shortstop by Pedroia.

Collectively, those four players have produced 75 wins since 2010, averaging just over 4.0 WAR per every 600 plate appearances. Of the 50 player-seasons of three wins or better* produced by second baseman since 2010, they’re responsible for 16 (i.e. nearly a third) of them. And this is merely accounting for those second baseman who were members of Pac-12 schools. Ben Zobrist, another college product who’s played mostly second base, has recorded another five good seasons. Danny Espinosa, Dan Uggla, and Rickie Weeks have all also recorded multiple good seasons by this measure.

*Or what I’ll also refer to as a “good” season throughout the remainder of this post.

That seemed like a lot of college players developing into good major-league second basemen. On account of I’m paid to do such things, I endeavored to determine if it really was.

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What follows represents the third in a three-part series devoted to producing and analyzing objective demographic data regarding those players who’ve become good major leaguers. Last Wednesday, I considered good players by their amateur origins — i.e. whether they were signed to professional contracts out of college, junior college, etc. On Friday, I examined good players by draft round. In this installment, I look at good players by the conferences in which they played as collegiate athletes (which obviously excludes international, prep, and junior-college players).

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Note: this post contains three-dimensional pie charts, less because they’re particularly well suited to presenting data clearly and more because the author’s whole life is an exercise in questionable decision-making.

What follows represents the second in a three-part series devoted to producing and analyzing objective demographic data regarding those players who’ve become good major leaguers. On Wednesday, I considered good players by their amateur origins — i.e. whether they were signed to professional contracts out of college, junior college, etc. In this installment, I look at good players by the round in which they were originally selected during the amateur draft (which obviously excludes any consideration of those players signed as international free agents).

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Recently, Jeff Sullivan wrote a piece here attempting to answer a question notable both for its simplicity and importance. The question: how many good players were good prospects?

As Sullivan notes, one typically finds the question pursued in reverse: of this or that group of prospects (top-10 prospects, top-100 prospects, etc), how did they fare in the major leagues (if they even made it that far)? There’s great utility in this sort of information — in particular where our understanding of prospect valuations is concerned. An appearance by a young player on one of these prospect lists tends to indicate, if not certain future value, at least present trade value. In other words: even those prospects who fail to record even one plate appearance or innings — even they are capable of possessing significant value.

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What follows does not constitute the most rigorous of statistical analyses. Rather, it’s designed to serve as a nearly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, have considerably more enthusiasm for than actual knowledge of the collegiate game — a shorthand means, that is, towards detecting which players have produced the most excellent performances over the first weeks of the college season.

As in the first ever edition of this same thing from last week, what I’ve done is utilize principles recently introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just over four years ago now, I wrote a post for this site called Dollar Sign on the Scout. A nod, that title, to an excellent work of non-fiction by Kevin Kerrane. The basic goal of the post was to identify those scouts who had created the most surplus value for their respective clubs — which is to say, had signed the players who produced wins above and beyond the sort their respective signing-bonus dollar figures would typically fetch on the open market. For the purposes of that study, I used Victor Wang’s then mostly current work on prospect valuations (updated multiple times in the interim). I also used the signing-scout data made available for each prospect by Baseball America in their annual handbook documenting such players.

By this methodology, the top scout over the five-year period between 2006 and -10 was Detroit’s Bill Buck, who was given credit for signing Cameron Maybin, Rick Porcello, and Justin Verlander — which triumvirate received nearly $10 million in bonuses, but whose rankings among Baseball America’s top-100 prospects at various points suggested they’d produce over $70 million more than that for the club in terms of overall value.

The thing about Porcello and Maybin and Verlander, though, is that they were all drafted in the first round, and first-round signings are typically the result not merely of a single, unkempt bird-dog following his intuition down a dusty, rural two-track, but rather of a decision made by a collection of front-office employees — including crosscheckers, a scouting director, and the general manager. As such, it doesn’t entirely make sense to credit an area scout with the signing of first-round draftee.

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